Texas youth prison director resigns weeks after a statewide lockdown

What happened

The executive director of the Texas Juvenile Justice Department has resigned, KUT and The Texas Newsroom reported on Friday. The news came from a message she sent staff that morning. “I want you to hear directly from me that I have submitted my resignation,” wrote Shandra Carter, who has led TJJD since 2022, according to the report. She added in the message, “I will always be proud of TJJD, and I will always be rooting for your success.”

According to The Texas Newsroom, she leaves weeks after TJJD put all five of its youth prisons under a multiday lockdown at the same time. The lockdown kept hundreds of children in their cells day and night, and advocacy groups criticized it harshly, the outlet reported. A September investigation by KERA and The Texas Newsroom, based on thousands of pages of shift logs, found scores of self-harm episodes among the children in the first few days. It also found many times when staff struggled to manage and said they urgently needed more resources.

Carter has said she ordered the lockdown so staff across the agency could review their safety procedures after an “exceptionally brutal assault” on a juvenile correctional officer, The Texas Newsroom reported. That assault took place at the Gainesville State Juvenile Correctional Facility, according to the outlet. TJJD declined to comment for the story.

Neither The Texas Newsroom nor The Texas Tribune, which confirmed the resignation separately, reported why Carter left. The Tribune reported that Deputy Executive Director Sean Grove will serve as interim leader while the board plans an executive search. Board Chair Manny Ramirez thanked Carter for her “many years of service to TJJD and our state,” according to the Tribune.

Our reflection

Start with the people a resignation letter never reaches. An officer was hurt badly enough that the agency locked down every one of its youth prisons, and hundreds of children then spent days and nights in cells. The shift logs show what that did to some of them, and in those same logs the staff on duty wrote that they needed help. Every one of those children has a family somewhere in Texas.

Mark 5 tells about a man who lived among the tombs outside a town. People had chained him again and again. Night and day he cried out and cut himself with stones. The town met his suffering with chains and distance. Their fear was real, and it never healed him. Jesus crossed the lake and went straight to him. Soon the man was sitting there clothed and in his right mind. Then Jesus did the part we skip: he sent him home to his own people.

I am not comparing these young people to that man. I am comparing us to the town. When something frightens us, the easy move is to shut a door on it and call the quiet safety. Most of us do the same thing in private. We lock the anger we never faced and the shame from something we did at sixteen in a back room, and we tell ourselves that silence means healed. Jesus walks toward the tombs we build, in a state agency and in our own chest. He never pretends the danger is fake, and he never leaves the person there.

A new leader is an open door, and doors like this close fast. Whoever runs TJJD next takes over the same strained staff and the same logs. Texans can ask for specific things: public reporting on how long young people are confined and what care reaches them, enough trained staff that one crisis does not lock down a whole system, protection for the officers in those halls, and an honest look at how many of these children could be served closer to home. A safe unit for a teenager and a safe shift for an officer are one project.

This is the work We The Revolt does. We run programming inside juvenile detention and walk beside young people for twelve months after release. Our home base is Miami, and we also work out of hubs in Chicago and Houston. I have sat across from young men who were sure their cell was the last chapter. Sent home with someone beside them, some of them now lead.

So pray this week for the officer who was hurt and for the young people who came through that lockdown. Then pick one step below and take it before Friday.

Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them, and those who are mistreated, since you also are in the body.

Hebrews 13:3

Source: KUT 90.5 / The Texas Newsroom, “Texas youth prison director resigns following controversial multiday lockdown”